tips and tricks :: the dress shot

Besides the Groom, the date and the venue… your wedding dress is a huge part of what defines the shape of your wedding. Elegant, classic, magical, flirty, thematic, simple… the list goes on. The dress is also where we start on a wedding day. After we arrive, introduce ourselves to everyone in the Bridal Suite, set up our gear, and scout out the day’s setting, we get to work and begin by photographing the dress. Of all the bridal details (shoes, jewelry, perfume, garter, etc) the dress is the one with the biggest wow factor. We like to take time staging dress shots, making sure the dress is in the best light with a backdrop that will hopefully add to the story of the day.

This is why in today’s tips and tricks post, we’re giving you a few suggestions on how to make this photo go smoothly… literally 😉

1. This should go without saying, but make sure the dress is actually at the location where the Bride will be getting ready the morning of the wedding. Or at least make sure the dress has arrived by the time your photographers are scheduled to begin. There have been occasions where the dress is nowhere to be found, and the person brining it to the bridal suite runs a few hours late. Not all that good of a plan. When you have the ability to do so, reserve your suite the night before you need it and keep all the bridal suite items in one place.

2. Let it out! After your final fitting, you wait for the call saying your dress is ready to be picked up. Hooray! This is a fun phone call, we know. So you bring it home and for a week or two it sits in your house, protected in its garment bag (good plan). However, we suggest letting the dress out of the bag the day before the wedding. Tulle, satin, organza, lace… they all wrinkle and they all need time to let gravity do its work. Sometimes simply hanging your dress out of the bag, keeping the train off the floor will allow the weight of the dress itself to pull out a majority of the wrinkles. If you take the dress out of its bag and realize it’s in serious need of a steaming… go ahead and do it the night before your wedding day. Too often we arrive, ready to start, and a wedding dress is hanging from a door still wrapped up in its garment bag 3 weeks after it’s been picked up from the bridal shop. That’s when we have to get together with the Bridesmaids to tag team the steaming efforts to get the dress ready to be photographed. Goodbye timeline! We just spent 45 minutes steaming a dress with 100 layers of tulle 😉 So please, take your dress out of its bag the day before your wedding, and make sure it doesn’t need to be steamed. If it does, don’t wait until the morning of your wedding!

3. The hanger. While we don’t really think anyone needs to spend $100 on a custom hanger from etsy, it is 10 times better to photograph a dress hanging on a solid wood hanger rather than the cheap plastic thing you get from the bridal shop. If you’re in a hotel for the getting ready portion of the day, we can usually borrow one of the hotel’s hangers. But if you’re at home or in a suite that doesn’t have wooden hangers available make sure you find one a few weeks before the wedding. Just have it on hand and we’ll do all the staging, switching out the plastic hanger (which are very good at what they do) for the wooden one (which look a lot better). A dress hanging from a beautiful bookshelf, a gorgeous mantel or even from the branch of an oak tree shouldn’t be held up by a plastic hanger.

4. Trust us, we’ll take good care of your dress. We always bring them back 😉 Sometimes when the circumstances call for it, we take the dress out of the place where the Bride is having her hair and makeup done. For many reasons, this needs to be done, but when the time comes for us to take the dress out of the room we see a wave of panic come across the Bride’s face. Through a smile she asks “Oh… so you’re taking it away? Where is it going?” Yeah it’s a little weird to watch someone else trot out of your bridal suite with your dress in tow, but we want you to know you can trust us to take good care of it. We both understand how important this dress is to each and every Bride we work with. So we are very careful with it, and make sure to care for it like it were our own. Yes, sometimes we like to take a dress outside and photograph it hanging from a tree branch (because in some circumstances this backdrop adds to the elements within a wedding), but we promise it will be ok 😉

5. Don’t forget the veil! Usually your veil will be wrapped in a separate bag within the garment bag your dress is hanging in. Take that puppy out and let it hang as well.

6. Include the Bridesmaids dresses! Whenever possible, we love to photograph the Bride’s dress hanging with the Bridesmaids dresses. This is becoming a highly requested photo and we love to take it! So make sure the Bridesmaids dresses are ready, hanging, and waiting to be photographed when your photographers arrive. Also, we typically use a Bridesmaids dress as a back drop for small details like the jewelry and perfume. So we always like to have at least one Bridesmaids dress around for those. It’s a great way to incorporate your wedding colors into your final collection of images without having to rely on the decor within the bridal suite which may not match up with your theme.